“Economic empowerment is about making markets work for women(at the policy level) and empowering women to compete in markets (at the agency level)”

Now, food prices are skyrocketing, fuel for transport and cooking are up, communities are strangled with debt, and what is the World Bank talking about? Empowering women to compete. This is their ultimate solution for everything.

This is what they really mean by “gender mainstreaming”. Imagine women storming cities in the 1970s, hands up high in the vagina symbol screaming at unison “GENDER MAINSTREAMING!!!”: what an image of co-optation could have been. One thing seems clear about this current respectable slogan of World Bank policy on gender and development: whatever will happen through the energy, food, financial, or environmental crises, the subjectification of women to the market in particular, and therefore the reshaping of the conditions of reproduction in general (who knows in what direction…), will be central to their managing of these crises . . .